Posted in the soc.culture.african newsgroup, 18 February 2003

Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, on
October 10, 1897. His father, a Baptist preacher, had been a slave.

As a boy, Elijah worked at various jobs involving manual labor. At the
age of 26, he moved with his wife and two children (he was to have
eight children in all) to Detroit.

There in 1930, Poole met Fard Muhammad, also known as W.D. Fard, who
had founded the Lost-Found Nation of Islam. Poole soon became
Fard’s chief assistant and in 1932 went to Chicago where he
established the Nation of Islam’s Temple, Number Two, which soon
became the largest. In 1934, he returned to Detroit.

When Fard disappeared that year, political and theological rivals
accused Poole of foul play. He returned to Chicago where he organized
his own movement, in which Fard was deified as Allah and Elijah
(Poole) Muhammad became known as Allah’s Messenger. This
movement soon became known as the Black Muslims.

During World War II, Elijah Muhammad expressed support for Japan, on
the basis of its being a nonwhite country, and was jailed for
sedition.

The time Muhammad served in prison was probably significant in his
later, successful attempts to convert large numbers of black prison
inmates, including Malcolm X, to the Nation of Islam.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation grew under Muhammad’s
leadership. Internal differences between Muhammad and Malcolm X,
followed by the break between the two men and Malcolm’s
assassination, for which three Black Muslim gunmen were convicted,
provided a great deal of unfavorable media coverage, but this did not
slow the growth of the movement.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Elijah Muhammad moderated the
Nation’s criticism of whites without compromising its message of
black integrity. When Muhammad died on February 25, 1975, the Nation
was an important religious, political, and economic force among
America’s blacks, especially in this country’s major
cities.

Elijah Muhammad was not original in his rejection of Christianity as
the religion of the oppressor. Noble Drew Ali and the Black Jews had
arrived at this conclusion well before him. But Muhammad was the most
successful salesman for this brand of African American religion.

Thus he was able to build the first strong, black religious group in
the United States that appealed primarily to the unemployed and
underemployed city dweller, and ultimately to some in the black middle
class.

In addition, his message on the virtues of being black was explicit
and uncompromising, and he sought with at least a little success to
bolster the economic independence of African Americans by establishing
schools and businesses under the auspices of the Nation of Islam.